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Sunday, June 23, 2013

Magnani Paper Swatches

I was asked to do some Magnani paper trials for the Calligraphy Society of Victoria.

These are my results.

S U M M A R Y

The papers are
beautiful to touch and work with. Some were more responsive to others given the
media and the tools used. I included erasing lines as this is so common in our
work and I also included embossing. The papers I like the most for the more
painterly techniques that I use are almost all of them as you can see glimmers
of painterly swatches with and without gesso. They work exceptionally well even
the lighter weights, which took on a slight cockling.

Whilst these
Magnani papers are all good for specific purposes, the papers I would like best
for my personal use where I use a lot of wet media in the grounds are the two
Corona, the Revere Platinum 300gsm, the two Acquerello hot and cold press and
strangely enough I love the Annigoni but I would limit the wet media I place on
this paper.

Some of these
papers are excellent for printmaking and embossing. Perhaps the Pescia would
fall into this category.

For pointed pen
work I trialed both upright and angled and found most of the papers lacking for
very fine pen work. From the swatches and what little I did with the pointed
pen I found most papers worked in varying degrees of success but, the most
responsive were the Revere Platinum 145gsm, the Velata Avorio 120gsm, the
Vergata Avorio 90gsm and the Vergella Avorio 115gsm.

Noodlers ink. I
quite like the Noodlers ink particularly for washes and stronger grounds. As
you can see it has behaved very badly when used with a Brause 4mm and worked
thickly onto the paper. I suggest therefore, this ink is never used in a book where the
pages agitate each other as you can see it offsets at the lighted touch. And to
add insult it blurs when sprayed for protection. I primarily use Noodlers ink in my Lamy Safari sketching pens without a problem with smudging and I mix it with media
such as gesso, matte mediums, molding pastes and crackling pastes for works on
canvas, paper and mdf board. Thinner washes do no behave this way with the
Noodlers ink but lesson learnt, proceed with care.

4 comments:

it might be of interest to folk to note that the Revere, Velata and Vergella are also excellent to use in the inkjet/laser printers... I've used the Velata and the Revere in separate printed book editions (with just a titch of calligraphy and other bits ;) ) I lurve the papers (yummy!)

Ronnie, I'll pass that information on the Sarah Dehn who asked around to get folk to do these swatches. I believe she will be displaying them all ... with results ... and I had some real dooseys (sp?) read that as shockers ... with mine.

I still love the Aquarello the best but there are some really gorgeous papers. I am thinking book-makers and print-makers would have wonderful results using other methods. x x g